Cunning

Don Herzog has written a book: Cunning.

The book should get a lot of attention, if only because we all can cite various examples.

Here's a familiar one from a review of the book:

Had no one bothered to kill these notions before the end of the 20th century, the case of genial, chubby, avuncular Charles Kuralt would have done the job.

He appeared spectacularly honest, a boy from a North Carolina tobacco farm who worked his way up to CBS television and became famous for his folksy On the Road essays. Alas, his reputation for probity collapsed after his death in 1997, when a Montana woman named Patricia Shannon came forth to claim, successfully, a piece of his estate, a property in Montana worth US$600,000. She was his great secret, a common-law wife. For 29 years Kuralt had supported her and her children, an arrangement of which his legal wife in New York was ignorant. Herzog asks, "Would you have suspected that cherubic teddy bear?"

Of course not, but think of the cunning! Imagine the odd silences, the not-quite-explained trips, unlikely absences during family holidays. Think of how carefully he must have hidden his money from his wife -- over nearly three decades. Bear in mind, too, that years of broadcasting on CBS made him a celebrity in Montana as much as anywhere. How did he deflect the suspicions of neighbours? How did he, in his mind, keep two lives apart? His agile cunning reached Olympic levels.

Read the rest of the review here.

[Hat tip: Arts & Letters Daily ]